Drug WarRant

Link

“It is time we were honest about the problems we face with the drug trade. Drugs are a source of criminal profit, and that has led to shootings and even murders. Just like we learned in the 1920s with the prohibition of alcohol, prohibition of marijuana is fueling violent activity,” the mayor said in the written version of his speech. […]

“I know every one of the city council members sitting to my left and right believe as I do: it’s time for this state to legalize marijuana, and stop the violence, stop the incarceration, stop the erosion of civil liberties, and urge the federal government to stop the failed war on drugs.”

Hope for the future

Check out this outstanding OpEd by Brown University Junior Jared Moffat: U.S. drug policies are a crime against humanity

Myanmar declares a war on opium

Gee, I wonder why nobody thought of that before. A war on drugs? Yeah, that’ll work.

“Every year the international community spends millions of dollars (on anti-narcotics initiatives) in countries like Afghanistan and Colombia, and the outcome is not satisfactory,” Sit Aye, senior legal advisor to President Thein Sein, said in an interview. “Here, with international assistance, we guarantee to wipe out the opium problem by 2014.”

Abraham Lincoln Was A Hempster

Some enjoyable reading for Presidents’ Day.

Interesting reading over at Cato Unbound for those who like philosophical discussions about law and rights: What is Due Process?

It’s an entire series of articles and responses on the subject. I’m particularly impressed with much of what Tim Sandefur has to say in the discussion:

My point here is to explain briefly how the Constitution’s promise that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law” means not only that government must take certain procedural steps (hearings, trials, and so forth) when it imposes a deprivation, but also that some acts are off limits for government, “regardless of the fairness of the procedures used to implement them.”

In a later response (Is Everything Congress Passes Really a Law?), Sandefur passes on this gem from Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 33:

acts of the [federal government] which are not pursuant to its constitutional powers…will [not] become the supreme law of the land. These will be merely acts of usurpation, and will deserve to be treated as such. Hence we perceive that the clause which declares the supremacy of the laws of the Union…only declares a truth, which flows immediately and necessarily from the institution of a federal government. It will not, I presume, have escaped observation, that it expressly confines this supremacy to laws made pursuant to the Constitution

Somewhat odd article in Christian Science Monitor: Why military hawks are leading drug legalization debate in Latin America

The underlying justification for most prohibitionists (other than sadomoralists) is that prohibition somehow is responsible for massive reductions in the use of drugs (and therefore a host of imagined societal-destroying maladies caused by drug use). Although you’ll pretty much never find them willing to specifically compare the massive list of prohibition’s costs to this imagined societal value, it’s implied that the reduction in drug use is more than enough to put up with this “collateral” damage.

And yet, of course, no actual evidence has ever supported this view.

And here, yet again, is evidence that refutes it.

Why the Government should take lessons from Peter Tosh

Check out this chart of nine European countries that have had changes in penalties for marijuana use, and the shifts in marijuana use prior to and after that penalty change.:

There are a lot of reasons for fluctuations in drug use in various countries. Legal penalties clearly don’t make a difference.

So, for the 100,000th time, softening drug penalties does not “send the wrong message”, or apparently any message at all. The vapid “drugs are harmful so we should keep them illegal” argument is straightforwardly wrong: some drugs are harmful, but it makes no difference keeping them illegal, except that it gives lots of criminals lots of money, causes crime and damages people health. It’s a strange day indeed when Peter Tosh has a more nuanced approach to government policy than the Government does.

Maybe not that strange.

In Vancouver:

“If we are allowed to deal with our eternity and all that we believe in spiritually, and if we’re allowed to read any book that we want under freedom of speech, why is it we can’t put into our body whatever we want?” Paul proclaimed from Vancouver.

When President Otto Perez of Guatemala proposed legalization of drugs, an interesting question was how and whether the U.S. would respond. Well, the U.S. is actually sending someone to talk with him about legalization!

US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will visit Guatemala next week for talks on President Otto Perez’s bold proposal to legalize drug production and consumption, authorities said Saturday.

Wait.

Who?

As Sanho Tree tweeted: “Why not someone from State? Is CentAm part of US homeland?”

Personally, I have always found the name of that department somewhat creepy. Giving it global reach doesn’t help.

I’ve mentioned the asset forfeiture case of the Motel Caswell before, but here is some good additional coverage.

The issue is that the Motel Caswell, which Russ Caswell and his family have owned free and clear for two generations, is located in an area where there is some crime. A number of drug busts have taken place at the Motel, although this is an insignificant number compared to the number of stays overall. The police agree that Russ and his family are not involved in drug activity in any way and that Russ has tried to work with police, reporting drug activity to the police and evicting troublemakers. Yet the police and the Department of Justice are trying to seize the property, worth one million dollars.

Civil Forfeiture Abuse Case to be Argued Today before Federal Court in Boston from the Institute of Justice, includes a video about the Motel and the forfeiture abuse.

Congress already passed a law that forbids the DOJ from taking the Motel Caswell. The DOJ is ignoring it. at Forfeiture Reform. Good discussion by Scott Alexander Meiner about the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 which addressed exactly this kind of forfeiture abuse.

New voice in drug-war debate: businessmen who are feeling the pinch

But it’s the private sector’s understanding of the hemispheric supply chain and demand, he says, that posits business leaders to lend their voice to the debate, says Zamora.

“[I]t is hard to talk about certain issues related to drug-trafficking [for politicians]. But for the business class, we have visions that are more pragmatic,” Zamora says. This might include focusing on freeing up resources through the decriminalization of drugs, and diverting profits away from traffickers. That could allow the taxation of businesses involved in the drug trade, followed by the investment of that money into military and police in order to crack down on criminals.

Carolina Castellanos, director of Guatemalan- American Chamber of Commerce (AMCHAM Guatemala) says leaders of the private sector in Guatemala have been communicating by email this week to discuss the merits of President Pérez’s proposal as well.

Obama’s War on Pot by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone.

Back when he was running for president in 2008, Barack Obama insisted that medical marijuana was an issue best left to state and local governments. “I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue,” he vowed, promising an end to the Bush administration’s high-profile raids on providers of medical pot, which is legal in 16 states and the District of Columbia.

But over the past year, the Obama administration has quietly unleashed a multi­agency crackdown on medical cannabis that goes far beyond anything undertaken by George W. Bush.

Drug war in Afghanistan a lost cause in Adelaide Now.

Despite the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars in a conflict that has so far cost the lives of almost 3000 Coalition troops, including 32 Australians, production of the drug by Afghan farmers rose between 2001 and 2011 from just 185 tonnes to 5800 tonnes.

It increased by 61 per cent last year alone. The United Nations yesterday warned that the situation was out of control.

Kevin Sabet has another OpEd as part of the New York Times Room for Debate: How to Treat the Epidemic

Second, our governments must lead a more coordinated and vigorous attack on this problem.

Our governments’ coordinated and vigorous attack is what got us into this mess.

Finally, industry has a part to play in this too. The formulation of drugs that cannot be abused (yes, “abuse-deterrent” drugs are possible)

Whoa. That sound creepily like adding methyl alcohol to alcohol in prohibition to poison people who used it recreationally, or like adding acetaminophen to pain pills to destroy people’s livers. Yeah, let’s save people by killing them.

It’s not like the others in the Room for Debate group are much better (see links on the left of Sabet’s article). Linda Simoni-Wastila advocates a national monitoring program even without any evidence of effectiveness. Andrew Kolodny thinks patients in pain should be given less pain medication and just suffer through it. Jonathan Caulkins says absolutely nothing in four paragraphs.

I know that there are a lot of people out there who want to treat prescription drug abuse as a completely separate issue from illicit drug abuse – after all, prescription drugs (within certain tightly controlled parameters only) are legal. But it’s all interrelated. The war on drugs has affected all drug abuse, because the entire pharmacology has been put out of whack. There will always be some people who will look to drugs as a way of dealing with life. What we need to be doing is coming up with better and safer options for those people (combined with education and treatment, of course) rather than trying to ratchet up enforcement in a zero-tolerance system.

The failed system we have of constantly increasing enforcement has only driven people to more dangerous activity rather than reducing harm, while also indiscriminately sweeping in all the responsible drug users who don’t need assistance. A responsible system of regulated legalization of drugs, with different regulations for different drug harms, would leave the responsible users alone, reduce the harm to all, and free up the system to focus on helping abusers before they die.

Not a single one of the debaters in the New York Times Room for Debate is willing to address a system that will really change things for the better.

Editorial in the Bangkok Post:

Quick executions no solution to drug problem

When the voice of reason is that you should take some time before executing convicted drug offenders rather then executing them immediately, then the entire conversation itself exists in some bizarro world outside civilized society.

Congratulations to Florida for resisting the lure of privatizing its prisons yesterday.

Today, the Florida Senate averted disaster by voting down a proposal to create the largest private prison system in America. The plan would have turned over nearly 30 Florida correctional facilities to private, for-profit companies, which have would run the prisons under contract with the state. […]

The defeat of the privatization bill is a victory for Florida. As Julie Ebenstein, Policy & Advocacy Counsel at the ACLU of Florida, explained shortly after the bill’s defeat: “Florida’s prison system needs reform, but private prisons aren’t reform – they deform the process by linking corporate profit to incarceration. The bottom line is that private prisons make money by keeping people in prison when we should be looking for ways to keep them out in the first place.”

The privatization of prisons is one of the more perverse developments to our criminal justice system in recent years. It makes no long term logical fiscal sense to taxpayers and it’s a disaster in terms of public policy, as it actually creates a fiscal incentive to private companies to lobby for more people to be locked up.

This disturbing article by Chris Kirkham makes it clear: Private Prison Corporation Offers Cash In Exchange For State Prisons

As state governments wrestle with massive budget shortfalls, a Wall Street giant is offering a solution: cash in exchange for state property. Prisons, to be exact.

Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest operator of for-profit prisons, has sent letters recently to 48 states offering to buy up their prisons as a remedy for “challenging corrections budgets.” In exchange, the company is asking for a 20-year management contract, plus an assurance that the prison would remain at least 90 percent full, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Huffington Post.

Did you catch that part? “a 20-year management contract, plus an assurance that the prison would remain at least 90 percent full”

Now if that isn’t a perverse incentive. The state actually entering into an agreement that guarantees a certain prison population. And if prison population falls? Why, I guess they’ll just have to convict more people, sentence them for more years, or pass more criminal laws.

This puts the private prison industry and the states into a joint interest in maintaining prison populations. And that means certain things must be avoided, as Corrections Corporation has made clear…

“The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws,” the company’s most recent annual filing noted. “For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”

Drug legalization is bad for the business of incarceration.